Can Matt Hessler re-create the success he has found in Detroit’s one-time Chinatown neighborhood far from the boom of Midtown in northwest Detroit’s Avenue of Fashion?

He sure thinks so.

Hessler, who is managing member of Bagley Forest Property LLC, just spent $438,000 on an approximately 34,000-square-foot retail strip at the southwest corner of Livernois Avenue and Seven Mile Road.

It’s there that he plans to spend $5 million, including property acquisition costs, to renovate the building, which contains multiple vacant storefronts and was once home to a B. Siegel Co. department store.

What’s in the future for the property, which he purchased from Farmington Hills-based Howard Schwartz Commercial Real Estate LLC on Friday?

Look for retail stores, restaurants and, yes, even about a dozen apartments ranging from 600 to 1,000 square feet catering to the nearby University of Detroit Mercy students, he said.

“If this can be part of the beginning, where you have sort of a walkable strip and you add clothing stores and retail stores into the mix, you have sort of a functioning city block,” Hessler said.

He knows the project will be far larger than his two-year effort to renovate the 9,700-square-foot building at 3401 Cass Ave. in Midtown., which he purchased in February 2014 for $225,000, according to CoStar Group Inc., a Washington, D.C.-based real estate information service.

There, tenants such as Eight Degrees Plato beer store and The Peterboro restaurant have opened, and September saw the opening of his Iconic Tattoo shop, a sister store to his XS Tattoo shop in Rochester.

“It’s real, abandoned, nonfunctional, for sure,” Hessler said of the Livernois property.

“But it was the same deal in Midtown with a dilapidated, vacant building that I restored and leased out. These are in much better shape than the Midtown building was.”

Southfield-based Indigo Centers represented Hessler in the purchase and will be responsible for leasing the Livernois property to tenants.

Hessler expects a similar capital structure for renovating the northwest Detroit building as he used for the Midtown project, which included grants, Detroit real estate investment funds and bank financing.

Invest Detroit financed the acquisition and predevelopment cost, he said. The Detroit office of Quinn Evans Architects is the architecture firm on the Livernois project, he said.

Hessler not only has an emotional and practical attachment to the property – he lives just a couple blocks away with his wife in the Sherwood Forest neighborhood – but also sees new life in the area, he said.

“There is a lot of energy going into the corridor right now, with restaurants and shops right in that part of Livernois,” he said.

The project is expected to start by the end of the year, with new businesses opening next year.

Construction is “pending everything,” he said.

“I need to hustle for money,” he said with a laugh. “And there’s some asbestos and environmental remediation.”

Stay tuned.

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